Reviews Category

by Matthias Saying goodbye to one of your favourite bands at some strange festival sponsored by a telecommunications company and where they played as a support act (!) for Good Charlotte (!!) just didn’t feel right. But it happened in the summer of 2007. And then there was darkness. …until late 2010. Self-ironic as they are, boysetsfire returned to another telecommunications festival thingy and shortly afterwards announced to be back as a band full-time. And, as they say, the rest is history: a new (pretty great) album („While a NationRead More

When you start working in the music industry you naturally end up making friends who work at labels, managements, booking agencies or whatever it is you can do with music to make a living. Over the course of the last few years I’ve met plenty of people. Some are total morons, some like to brag, some you meet just briefly and some become trusted allies and friends. It must have been around this time a year ago, that one of those good friends of mine mentioned Cosby for the firstRead More

Last week I was talking about the new video from Farben/Schwarz for their song Vollkontrast and my love for northern German punk. This week I will continue doing so in this review for Eins the debut EP by Farben/Schwarz. When I was a teenager, I spent hours after school in front of our family computer in the basement. At times I was playing video games, sometimes I’d chat to friends via instant messenger services but most of the time I’d listened to music. Back then I got excited easily. IRead More

I can’t really remember when I first heard a Beach House song. I don’t know if it was a song from their first, second or third record. When I think about it long enough I might remember the day, the time or the details and whereabouts. But right now I don’t want to know. Beach House have always been this kind of dream-like band. Existing whenever I felt like I needed to daze off. It’s in their sound. To be honest, I think their ‚hits‘ are just called ‚hits‘ becauseRead More

It’s been a long time since that song with handclaps and piano graced our radio stations. Boy came out of nowhere and drove everyone (starting from my sister, to my mom and even my grandma would have tapped her feet to that song if she would have been alive then) a little crazy. Once the two adorable girls had taken over Germany, entering the top 10 with their debut gold album Mutual Friends they took the next step and conquered the world. From their debut in 2011 they were constantlyRead More

Munich is kind of my spiritual home. My dad went to university there, it’s the capital of Bavaria, home to all of my family, and it’s home to the football club I’ve been supporting since I am able to think. I’ve never lived there and up until I finished university and started working, I had only ever been there twice (the first time with my grandparents when I was really young. The second time with my aunt, uncle and cousin when we visited the „Deutsche Museum“ and ended up notRead More

MS MR – How Does It Feel – the follow up to 2013’s ‚Secondhand Rapture‘ is everything what you’d expect from the Brooklyn based band. Trying its best to follow the debut’s success without sounding like a mediocre repetition. But could it have been bolder? Or is it fine for what it is?Read More

AB Syndrom have released their new album ‚Hey Herz‘, an eclectic mix of UK-Electronic, Post-Dubstep elements and German lyrics. How does that all fit together? Well just listen to it and you will understand! So let’s get the facts out of the way first. Yes, the four pice is based in Berlin. No, they are not originally from there but from a smaller town near Frankfurt (does anybody outside of Germany actually care if a band is originally from a different city then they are based in currently??). Their bioRead More

So Mumford & Sons have released a new record. It’s called ‚Wilder Mind‘ and apparently everybody is supposed to hate it. All the critics who were all so buzzing about this band when they played ‚true folk songs‘ are now hating the band. But why?Read More

Sometimes I wonder just how much could change in only two years and how the hell it got to be this way A couple of years ago, I was still an intern at an indie record label in Berlin. I discovered Touché Amoré, La Dispute & Defeater for myself. I fell in love with hardcore and punk again. And I had a girlfriend back then. The summer at the label was great. It was my entry to the music industry that I still work in today. It was the firstRead More